I personally like the "month and months" ending ... it is a little jarring, as a description of TEOTWAWKI should be.

So does this mean Moldbug is going to tell us what the neocamerialist/restorationist/Jacobite energy policy would be? Other than drilling in ANWR, I wouldn't have a clue.

My hindsight energy policy would be: setting up a formula-based petroleum tax policy which would collect higher taxes in times when prices were lower, thus cushioning the shocks by commensurately dropping taxes. It would be apply steady pressure for more fuel-efficient cars, instead of the unsteady pressure which gave us the AMC Gremlin in the 1970s and SUVs in the 1990s.

But that's a pipe-dream, because you couldn't in a sound-bite explain how higher taxes make pump prices lower. The only people would could understand it would be people with the neither the voting power or political will to make it happen.

Okay, best guess as to the King James XXIV energy policy: more nukes, a redirection of funds from social service charities to CNG and fuel-cell vehicle research, and ... I'm out of ideas.

Since Ih8brownfolk Anonymous keeps bringing it up, can we talk a little about the differences in races?

Because, honestly folks, I think people like the above get it way, friggin way, wrong. And, honestly, it's both tiresome to keep reading these things and off-putting when I want to invite a new reader to come on over to UR and see the current fascinating state of political thought.

The behavioral and mental capacities differentials within race that Ih8brownAnon and others keep harping on have much less (notice, I say "much less" not "nothing) to do with genetics than they have to do with environment.

And cross-adopt. I'm sure if we combed the books enough, we could find a nice mix of Our Favorite Races to gather information from.

I'd be willing to bet my guitar collection that the children would behave like their parents and peers much more than they would like their racial category.

Why is this important?

Because it is important to study and understand the culture (meaning language and behaviors) of the peoples we're interacting with. Necklacing isn't something you do because you have an excess of melanin in your body, it's something you do because you hate the Other (which is a fairly standard human response). I have been just as (or more) terrified by the stupidity and violence of drunk, uneducated rednecks as that of high, uneducated ninjas.

This is not to say that there are not vast, vast differences between cultural groups. That's obvious to anyone who has ever taken a non-State-sponsored breath. This doesn't think I mean that "vast re-education camps" would, have, or could work to habilitate a population to our current culture. There's simply too much population for that. The only thing that would work is to offer the choice to assimilate or go to (for lack of a better term) the Reservation. In that way we could have the use of the most motivated and productive citizens of any group while shunting off the slobs.

Gasoline! Cuffed Prometheus,juiced, filtered and fermented,The finest vintage of pourable arson,You knock us over with a lead bouquet,

the second stanza needs to be cleared up "death to insects" sounds like a rallying cry -- it needs a verb. And "old bicycle chains" doesn't add anything to the meaning -- perhaps something more sinister?

"Thankfully, the feeling is transient" is not a good line at all, nor does it fit with the poem.

I had to look "contango" up, which is always fun -- perfect word, btw (for those of you who didn't/don't know it, I suggest onelook.com).

The final three lines of the stanza, however, don't really mean much (and "of the dollar"?) and don't convey what I think you want them to say.

Not sure what "acid wire" means. The problem with "month and months" is not month but the use of "day" at the beginning of the sentence. Reconcile this and you get rid of the complaints ("from the month you go out we murder. . ." or something).

About the structure -- the quatrains work quite nicely but since the poem is without a metrical structure, I can't see justifying your widows -- "you have" and "No," -- either give them a reason to be there or bring the lines down.

"The story begins with violence in the 17th-century slave forts sprinkled along the west coast of Africa, where debtors, thieves, war prisoners, and those who would not convert to Islam were separated from their families, branded, and sold to Europeans who packed them into the pestilential ships that cargoed 20 million human beings (a conservative estimate) to the New World.

So...America's criminal underclass are the descendants of the black criminal underclass.

"So...America's criminal underclass are the descendants of the black criminal underclass."

Not an inaccurate statement. The Africans sold into slavery weren't the "kings down in old Congo" but the losers of wars, prisoners, etc. they were housed in isolation and continued to not engage in practical civilization. I would imagine the black families who have done the best in America are either the ones who were successful freedmen before the Civil War (the Revolution Redux?) or were "house ninjas" who had a good relationship with their familes (and were educated) -- the field workers who then went on, not to sharecropping, but to handouts in the cities and the North would have given birth to our current criminal types.

GMP: the experiment has been done. Its results are highly contrary to the Dogma of Zero Group Differences. Thus there is a certain amount of squid-ink around it, but the results are so clear that mostly it just is not talked about amongst whiterpeople. Of course, it is only IQ that they quantified among the adoptees. But that's because we have tests for it; "culture" is hard to quantify.

I would not be surprised to find out that most of the kids (white, black or mixed) in the Minnesota study "acted white" in accordance with their upbringing. So, you would be right in that sense. But IQ does have a strong effect on life outcomes, and in our society the low IQ tend to fall to the bottom. Also, I suspect that a lot of the cultural artifacts whiter people like require a certain amount of intelligence to enjoy.

I'd be quite surprised if the children of those adoptees with the low IQs were still acting white.

I would be much more interested in their life outcomes than IQ scores. If half of the 130 were boys, then statistically 65 of them should have prison records. Is this true?

I would also suppose that mate choices among all groups affects IQ greatly -- the less intelligence is prized in a mate, the lower the general IQ of the population will be. Again, though, this isn't a reason to go rejoicing in the death of folks as ih8ninjaAnon seems to.

Nor is it a reason to write off a group of people as a whole -- again, anyone's usefulness is predicated on his or her willingness to work and be productive -- which is why the optional Reservation idea is a good one (not forced Reservations as they are little better than prisons).

For now I'll comment only on "the month we murder each other for months."

Predictions of future crises based on extrapolation from current trends, like predictions about the impact of technology on social arrangements, are notoriously inaccurate. In the first decade of the twentieth century there were some who predicted that if things went on as they were, ere long the streets of New York city would be chest deep in horse manure. At the same time, the successes of early aviation prompted others to prophesy a future when the skies would be full of personal aircraft, and in place of carriage-houses, each well-appointed home would be adjoined by an airplane hangar.

The failure of both scenarios to come true shows how difficult it is to anticipate the way that markets, with their huge numbers of participants each acting in his own interest, will resolve what we see as current tendencies, whether dire or hopeful. The one thing we can say is that markets will resolve them. A great illustration of this was Julian Simon's famous (and successful) bet against Paul Ehrlich's prediction of a future of dire scarcity.

So far as I can tell I am completely lacking in clairvoyant qualities, but I'd venture that in a parallel to the Simon/Ehrlich wager, this time involving the probability of a future severe energy shortage, one would be better off to lay one's side bet on the side of Simonian abundance. The greatest obstacle against its prevailing is the possibility that political or bureaucratic interference would prevent markets from stimulating the development of new energy sources and bringing about their accustomed equilibrium between supply and demand.

Since Ih8brownfolk Anonymous keeps bringing it up, can we talk a little about the differences in races?

It's not a black thing, stupid. It's a stupid thing, stupid. I would be equally indifferent to the self-immolation of white or yellow folk. When some cracker blows up his meth lab and dies, that, too, is evolution in action.

Ih8StupidFolk

PS I certainly don't see why I should like gasoline any less just because some dummies set themselves on fire with it...

You say: I would be equally indifferent to the self-immolation of white or yellow folk. . .I certainly don't see why I should like gasoline any less just because some dummies set themselves on fire with it.

"Gasoline," however says:

every time someone in Africais dipped in you and leaps into flame.

The passive voice here "is dipped in you" means that the person is being dipped -- i.e. that they have no choice in the matter. The "someone in Africa" is not a self-immolater or a dummy setting themselves on fire (note, he did not say Asia, a culture in which self-immolation carries some significance). The "someone in Africa" is on the bad end of a necklacing or some similar murder tactic.

Also, this may have been the first or fiftieth time you posted, but since you refuse to use a handle, I have to assume that you are every idiotic Anonymous that posts on here.

The passive voice here "is dipped in you" means that the person is being dipped -- i.e. that they have no choice in the matter. The "someone in Africa" is not a self-immolater or a dummy setting themselves on fire (note, he did not say Asia, a culture in which self-immolation carries some significance). The "someone in Africa" is on the bad end of a necklacing or some similar murder tactic.

Periodically, people trying to steal gasoline from pipelines in Nigeria blow themselves up. It could as easily refer to such events.

Also, this may have been the first or fiftieth time you posted, but since you refuse to use a handle, I have to assume that you are every idiotic Anonymous that posts on here.

Blogger allows the host to prohibit anonymous postings if he wishes. MM has not prohibited them, and until he does, I'll continue to post anon whenever I feel like it. In short, get bent, self-appointed net nanny. Your childish ravings are entirely superfluous, and I am not responsible for your imbecile assumptions.

When you want to have an actual conversation, I'd be happy to. Otherwise, please consider yourself ignored until the farts from your fingers endanger the knowledge of others. I don't feel much compelled to respond other than to say that, indeed, one cannot be the cause of one's own passive voice -- that's why the passive voice exists. I.e. I cannot "be dipped" by myself -- only by someone else.

Also, in your rampant inability to read, you have missed my point about anonymous posting -- since you made a statement that could easily be interpreted as "woo hoo, another dead 'reggin,'" I threw you in with the lump of anonymous posters on UR who talk about not how to work around the mental differences in the races but why we should use these to go all early-20th century Eugenical on all the brown folk of the world.

In a final "also," your descent into name-calling is counter-productive at best and while you are not responsible for anything I think, you are responsible for the incoherent logorrhea that your fingers produce, seemingly independent of brain activity.

one cannot be the cause of one's own passive voice -- that's why the passive voice exists. I.e. I cannot "be dipped" by myself -- only by someone else.

Rubbish. Active voice: I wash. Normally in English this is used with a reflexive pronoun (i.e. I wash myself). But there is a passive voice: I am washed (i.e. by me). Similarly, active voice: I dip (i.e. myself), and passive voice, I am dipped (i.e. by me).

Also, in your rampant inability to read, you have missed my point about anonymous posting -- since you made a statement that could easily be interpreted as "woo hoo, another dead 'reggin,'" I threw you in with the lump of anonymous posters on UR who talk about not how to work around the mental differences in the races but why we should use these to go all early-20th century Eugenical on all the brown folk of the world.

Oh, I got it all right. I just wasn't going to call attention to your flagrantly absurd assumption that all anons are the same person. But now that you've brought it up, it was flagrantly absurd for you to lump me with all the other anon posters. I cannot be held responsible for your faulty assumptions.

your descent into name-calling is counter-productive at best

This from the guy who says, "Dear Stupid, you can't read, you are idiotic, learn to read!" among other things. You're not exactly on the moral high ground yourself, so you need to get off the "quit name-calling" hobby horse along with the grammar hobby horse.

Originally, "war prisoners" were the result of endemic warfare conducted for quite minor reasons, including to get female prisoners for the attacking tribe. In the early period, males were a bycatch who would otherwise have been slaughtered, not usually prisoners taken in defensive wars, not aggressors in their own right; slavery really was an improvement over the other options then. Quite early on the tail started wagging the dog, and wars were conducted with raids in order to get prisoners to sell as slaves; slavery had become a driver of human misery, and again the captives usually weren't aggressors themselves.

A good account of the trade in African slaves by other Africans is Sir Richard Burton's "A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahomé" (1864). It is available online. Go to www.burtoniana.org/books/, select this title, and you will be directed to a page where it can be downloaded as two .pdf files, one of each volume.

It was the lucky captives of king Gelele's tribe that were sold as slaves. The others were killed in great festivals of human sacrifice called the "Annual Custom" and the "Grand Custom."

Because, honestly folks, I think people like the above get it way, friggin way, wrong. And, honestly, it's both tiresome to keep reading these things and off-putting when I want to invite a new reader to come on over to UR and see the current fascinating state of political thought.

It is also tiresome to keep seeing the same familiar racial cannon, that can be found millions places, pop-up everywhere, even on a blog like this.